LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing

by Ryan Tinsdale


If you have a website and market that site and try to increase your placement with search engines, you have probably heard that one good way to do that is by having good keyword density, quality content, and a regularly updated site. What happens next is the search engine or directory will then analyze your site and rank it by the given keywords and the prevalence of those keywords on your site, and you site will then be indexed, page by page, by using those keywords.
When a web surfer uses a search engine or a directory to look for a website, they will enter keywords or keywords phrases for what they are searching and the search engine or directory will then return a list of all indexed sites that contain those words or terms, in the order in which the search terms are prevalent on the site.
So Google, who has shown itself to be an industry leader in search engine technology and rankings, now has a new technology - enter Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI.

Latent Semantic Indexing is an attempt to take search engine and directory searches performed by machines and 'humanize' them by returning less results that match only keywords, and actually return sites that have the same theme for which the surfer is searching.
This is a very rigid way of searching and does very little to take into consideration the actual content or the theme of the sites the search engine or directory returns.
Reciprocal and inbound linking is no longer as important as quality content and information on the site, and this is in part due to LSI. The basic idea of LSI is that, whereas in the past, articles and content had to be written in a halting way, with an excessive use of keywords in the content, making it not flow as naturally, theoretically, a website that was indexed through a search engine or directory using LSI could go back to writing naturally and have a better flow and feel.

For the web surfer, you should start to notice that your searches on Google, and other directories or search engines you search with, will start increasing in relevancy for your search, and reduce the total number of websites that are returned. For those of you out there who can never find what you want online while all your friends seem to find it easily, rest assured that Latent Semantic Indexing will soon improve your ability to find what you are looking for on the internet.